Montana Creeds: Tyler. Linda Miller Lael

mirror, to make eye contact with her daughter. “Okay, we’ll stop,” she said. “We’ll get off at the next exit, find one of those salad buffet places.”

      “Rabbit food,” Hal murmured.

      “One burger wouldn’t kill us,” Tess said.

      Whose side was the child on, anyway?

      “No burgers,” Lily said firmly. “Fast-food places don’t offer organic beef.”

      “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hal said.

      “Kindly stay out of this,” Lily told her father evenly. “My purse is on the seat beside you, Tess. There’s a package of crackers inside. Have some, and I’ll keep my eye out for a decent market.”

      Sullenly—Tess was never sullen—the child rummaged through Lily’s handbag, found the crackers, tore open the package and munched.

      After that, none of them spoke. They were twenty minutes outside Stillwater Springs when they spotted the man and the dog walking alongside the highway.

      Something about the man jarred Lily—the set of his shoulders, the way he walked, something— tripping all sorts of inner alarms.

      “Stop,” Hal commanded urgently. “That’s Tyler Creed.”

       And I thought this day couldn’t get any worse .

      Lily pulled over and put on the brakes, while her father buzzed the passenger-side window down.

      “Tyler? Is that you?” he called.

      The man turned, flashed that trademark grin, dazzling enough to put a heat mirage to shame. Damn it, it was Tyler.

      All grown-up, and better-looking than ever.

      And here she was, with her back and thighs glued to the car seat and her hair tugged up into a spiky mess.

      He approached the car, the dog plodding patiently at his heels. Bent to look in at Hal. When his gaze caught on Lily, then Tess, the grin faded a little.

      “Hey, Doc,” Tyler said. “I heard you went through a rough spell. You feeling better?”

      “I’ll be all right, thanks to Dylan and Jim Huntinghorse,” Hal replied. “I went toes-up at Logan’s place, during a barbecue, and they gave me CPR. I’d be six feet under if it hadn’t been for those two.”

      Tyler gave a low whistle. “Close call,” he said. In high school, he’d been cute. Now, he was drop-dead gorgeous. His eyes were the same clear blue, though, and his dark hair still glistened, sleek as a raven’s wings. “Lily,” he added, in grave greeting.

      “Get in,” Hal said. “We’ll give you a lift to Stillwater Springs.”

      “Don’t you have a car?” Tess ventured, fascinated, straining in the hated “baby seat” to get a look at the dog.

      Tyler grinned again, and Lily’s stomach dipped like a roller coaster plunging down steep and very rickety tracks. “It broke down on a side road,” he explained. “No tow trucks available, so Kit Carson and I started hoofing it for home.”

      “Hoofing it?” Tess echoed, confused.

      “Walking,” Lily translated.

      Tyler chuckled.

      “Well, get in,” Hal said. “That sun’s hot enough to bake a man’s brain.”

      Tyler opened the right rear door of the Taurus, and he and Kit Carson took their places alongside Tess, the dog in the middle. Delighted, Tess shared the last of her crackers with Kit.

      “Obliged,” Tyler said.

      “My daddy died when I was four,” Tess said. “In a plane crash.”

      Lily tensed. Oddly, Tess often confided the great tragedy of her short life in strangers. With counselors and well-meaning friends, she tended to clam up.

      “I’m sorry to hear that, shortstop,” Tyler told her.

      “Is hoofing it the same as hitchhiking?” Tess asked. “Because hitchhiking is very dangerous. That’s what Mom says.”

      Lily felt Tyler’s gaze on the back of her neck, practically branding her sweaty flesh.

      “Your mom’s right,” Tyler answered. “But Kit and I didn’t have much choice, as it turned out.”

      “You could have called Logan or Dylan,” Hal said.

      Lily wondered at the note of caution in her father’s voice, but she was too busy merging back onto the highway to pursue the thought very far.

      “Cold day in hell,” Tyler said.

      Lily cleared her throat.

      “Cold day in heck, then,” he amended wryly.

      “Who are Logan and Dylan?” Tess asked.

      “My half brothers,” Tyler replied, belatedly buckling his seat belt.

      “Don’t you like them?” Tess wanted to know.

      “We had a falling out,” Tyler said.

      “What’s that?” Tess persisted.

      Risking a glance in the rearview mirror, Lily saw him ruffle Tess’s dark blond hair. She had Burke’s green eyes, and his outgoing personality, too. Telling her not to talk to strangers was pretty much a waste of time—not that Tyler Creed was a stranger, strictly speaking.

      “A fight,” Tyler said.

       “Oh,” Tess said, sounding intrigued. “I like your dog.”

      “Me, too.”

      Lily sat ramrod-straight in the sticky vinyl seat. Concentrated on her driving. She’d thought a lot about Tyler Creed since she’d hurried out to Montana to keep a vigil at her father’s bedside, but she hadn’t expected to actually run into him. He was a famous rodeo cowboy, after all—a sometime stuntman and actor, and he did commercials, too.

      People like that were, well, transitory. Weren’t they?

      Wandering through her kitchen with a basket of laundry one day a few years before, she’d glimpsed him on the countertop TV, hawking boxer-briefs, and had to sit down because of heart palpitations. Burke, an airline pilot by profession, had been between flights, and asked her what was the matter.

      She’d said she was getting her period, and felt woozy.

      She’d felt woozy, all right, but it had nothing to do with her cycle.

      “Grampa and I wanted hamburgers for lunch,” Tess informed her fellow passenger, “but she said it would clog our arterials, so now we have to wait and eat salad with tofu .”

      “Ouch,” Tyler commented. “That bites.”

      Lily pushed down harder on the accelerator.

      “Where shall we drop you off?” she asked sunnily, when they finally, finally hit the outskirts of Stillwater Springs. The place looked pretty much the same—a little shabbier, a little smaller.

      “The car-repair place,” Tyler replied.

      Lily had forgotten how sparely he used words, never saying two when one would do. She’d also forgotten that he smelled like laundry dried in fresh air and sunlight, even after he’d been loading or unloading hay bales all day. Or walking along a highway under a blazing summer sun. That his mouth tilted up at one corner when he was amused, and his hair was always a shade too long. The way his clothes fit him, and how he seemed so comfortable in his own skin…

       Do not think about skin, Lily told herself, aware that her father was watching her intently out of the corner of his eye, and that that eye was twinkling.

      “Thanks